New ABC circulation figures

Readership numbers might be a nice way to try selling ads, but I don't think there's any way to get an accurate count for that.
Circulation numbers matter because newspaper sales generate revenue and set the advertising rates. In an era where management cuts newsroom staff to make up for a lower profilt margin circulation numbers matter.

 

They definitely matter. If someone really wants to get rich, he will devise a new way to measure newspaper readership.

 

To better measure how many people are reading each issue, they could survey the subsribers to see how many people are reading each issue in the home, but the audits are usually third party. Plus, how many subscribers are going to spend the time to respond?

 

Hey, then all we have to do is drive down the circulation number to, like, ONE copy sold. That dog-earred copy surely would get read by millions of people. Double that, if we're counting eyeballs.

 

Circ numbers may well be garbage, irrelevant and everything else we want to believe about them.

But in many cases they are the only thing that junior ad agency buyers look at when they make decisions about buying advertising. And most of them could care less about quality of your demographics or pass-along rates or anything else. All they are looking at is cost per thousand subscribers and how the Jackass Flats Intelligencer matches up against The Bumfuck Times.

As long as that's the case, whether you think the numbers are 100 percent accurate or 1,000 percent bullshit, circ numbers will play a huge part in the financial health of most publications.

And when circulation falls, and ad sales then decline, newsrooms and news people pay for it with their jobs. Always.

Until that model and that thinking changes - "Hey, our sales are declining. I know how we fix it - let's dramatically cut the quality of our product and give our readers less!" - newsrooms are and will continue to be at risk.

 

Dallas Morning News dropped 50,000 subscribers and single copy sales when they ended what they called "vanity circulation" and it was about 10 percent of the total.
The News used to circulate in five states, and now it is a 200-mile radius of Dallas or maybe less, like 100 miles. They don't even hit all of Texas now.

 

... and his crappy, crappy product. Then again, this is the moron who employs a president who questioned why newsrooms need their own copy editors. :

 

So how much of this is a tightening up of circulation rules of the game and how much of this is reader decline?

 

A fair question.
One I don't think has an easy answer. But I'll take a stab, in big cities I think real readership is down. In medium sized places I think real readership is steady or slightly dipping. In smaller markets, steady or slightly increasing.
At least for the people that matter: business owners, local leadership, old money types.
When those kinds or people, or those who want to be those people, realize that information is power, they start reading the paper and a helluva lot closer.

 

I would agree with you if I thought newspapers still provided that kind of information. But most newspapers decided that covering the inner workings of local governments was too boring (and expensive) and replaced that coverage with generic trend stories that looked good in a paper 1,000 miles away, so we'll do one, too.

 

It's not stopping there. Look in the high school section on Saturday mornings. They don't even take boxscores from outside of the immediate suburban counties anymore.

 

I lived in a fairly good sized college town about 100 miles from Dallas up until about 5 years ago. When I first moved there the home-delivered DMN was damn near a final edition. It usually had west coast scores and it always had west coast gamers and notes for the DFW-area pro teams.

By the time we moved in 2002 we were getting a regional edition with an almost worthless sports section. When they made the switch we received a letter encouraging us to use the DMN website for up-to-date sports.

And Belo wonders why they're leaking money.